Tryangulation

It's just down the road from Paricutín

Do you remember in grade school the story about the Mexican volcano that rose overnight in a farmer's cornfield? That volcano is called Paricutín, and during its initial eruptions it destroyed the town of San Juan Parangaricutirimícuaro. The townspeople relocated and named their new community Nuevo San Juan Parangaricutirimícuaro, while the amazing story of the volcano brought some broad, but brief, attention to their tragedy and also to the astounding name of the town.

With the passing of time, the place name took on a mythical quality, and now many in Mexico doubt that Mexico's longest place name is authentic, although across the country people are amused by a famous tongue twister that evolved out of that name. I won't repeat the entire tongue twister here, but you can see different versions of it on the town's Spanish Wikipedia page. I've successfully used the tongue twister myself as a tool for teaching the language learning technique of the backward build-up: learning phrases by starting at the end and with lots of repetition gradually adding the preceding syllables, thus demonstrating that the technique works even with nonsense words.

Well, wouldn't you know that someone from that town eventually made it to Houston, and during a chance meeting and subsequent casual conversation about the both of us growing up on farms, he mentioned in passing the name of his hometown. Having myself come from near a place called Kalamazoo, I was also used to meeting people who didn't believe there really was such a place, and I had to confess to him that I too had doubted the name of his hometown. Still, we quickly got past that, I surprised him with my ability to recite the word without prompting, and I enjoyed our conversation far more than if I had just met a lady named Sue who really did sell seashells by the seashore.

I chalk this up as another example of my theory that there are wonderful unseen things --and people-- all around us. Take the time to find some of them and it just might make your day.

86 year old man earns university diploma

The Turkish newspaper Today's Zaman reported today about Mr Halis Beyhanoğlu, who graduated from elementary school in 1938 and just received his second university diploma in September at the age of 86. After being a civil servant for most of his life, he finally received a degree in public adminstration, so he now apparently has the choice of returning to work as the country's oldest bureaucrat, or staying in school as the oldest grad student. He says he wants to be a lecturer someday, so we wish him well (link).

This reminds me of a story a few years ago about an 84-year-old man who enrolled in first grade in Kenya as soon as the country began to provide free universal education, unashamed to sit among six-year-olds so that he might gain what had been deprived for so long. (click here for the rest of that story).

Both stories impact me for the brazenness of these gentlemen to pursue learning beyond society's limits of propriety. A couple years ago I shared on this blog the quote of a woman in her 90s who had not been so brazen: "If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken up the violin at 60. I'd have been playing for almost 40 years by now."

We --that is, I-- forgo so many endeavors because we are unaware of what is within us, how much endurance we carry, and the power of the victory over society's often silly ideas. So today I remind myself to pick up once again the aspirations that were within me and rekindle them, even if it is with the tiniest of sparks. So what if I'm past 50? Just think where I'll be in 40 years!

Something there is that doesn't love a row

Newer readers might not be aware of my contentious school project to protect the beautiful and critically endangered Centaurea tchihattcheffi (yanardöner in Turkish). The natural habitat of this nearly extinct species of the cornflower family is in the vicinity of our school, and for the past few years two of our science teachers and I have bravely fought to propagate seeds on our campus  (click here for photos and text from a happier time).

The flower's habitat is threatened by large scale agriculture, Ankara's urban sprawl and, ironically, its failure to be noticed (behavior which I have commented on before). After first collecting seeds in the wild (natural habitat pix here), we carefully prepared a plot close enough to be observed, but just out of the school bus and recess commotion. For a couple years following, we (that is, I) collected seeds, cleaned and sorted them, and then recruited students and colleagues to get a little dirty in the name of species diversity, sowing the seeds in our gradually increasing garden.

Who would have thought three years ago that we ourselves were a threat to our centaurea's survival?

Like I wrote recently concerning the local aversion to disorder, straight lines and right angles are the norm for flower gardens, and our nonconformist self-seeding weeds were a threat to that system. Our well meaning grounds crews and I were constantly in a race, they to restore order, and I to protect disheveled nature. As soon as I got one crew and crew chief on board with the project, they would be reassigned and new workers would show up, hustling to clean up the mess their predecessors apparently had left behind.

I was away for the entire fall semester this year, a critical time for fending off welldoers. When I returned to school in February I was disheartened to see that orderliness had finally won out: the garden was neatly hoed and planted with shrubs in straight little rows.  The notion of death by PBL crossed my mind.

A few weeks ago I finally went out to see if anything had survived, and felt the faintest whisper of hope when I found that there were, in fact, a few buds creeping out of the ground. I went back today and saw that quite a few more were popping up at the edges of the plot. I found the newest commander of the gardeners (the 4th in the lifetime of this project) and together we assessed the state of the plot and agreed on a plan and a compromise: once the centaurea were in bloom and easy to spot, workers could go in among them and pull up the other less desirable weeds.

While we were examining the grounds, we found that two had bloomed. I took some quick shots with my mobile phone, as evidence that our project had survived all our best efforts at project based learning.

The title of this post is adapted from the poem Mending Wall, by Robert Frost. The photo is unretouched, taken under heavily overcast skies.

Flat worlds of all sorts

As a brief stop on the way from ancient information technologies to the problem of paradigm shifts,  I have to share this video my son pointed me to. The video is a clip of a televised debate from Iraq on whether the Koran permits belief in the round earth theory. The content is disturbing, but maybe not for the reasons you think. If you're reading this via email, click here to see the video.

This poor man is mistaken, but not because he is a Muslim.  Muslim scholars --in Baghdad, no less-- began to reason out a methodology for empirical observation a thousand years ago. Islamic astronomers proposed earth's heliocentric orbit starting from the 8th century, and earth's rotation by the 11th century. Muslim scholars of that period built upon the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, who already had theories about a spherical earth; in the 9th century Arab astronomers even calculated the earth's circumference (they missed it by a few thousand miles), and developed spherical trigonometry to calculate the direction of Mecca from any point on the globe.

Non-critical thinking is not the intent of any religion. All of the monotheist faiths see the intellect and the ability to reason as divine gifts. So what has happened to our poor man with the thick glasses and the anesthetized mind? Why does he hold his beliefs so tenaciously? Does he build arguments upon arguments to protect some hidden, vulnerable thought? Is this part of the famous clash of civilizations?

No, this is a clash of epistemologies. The poor man is mistaken because his paradigm leads him to believe that most knowledge necessary for a good life has already been "revealed" and we should not be worried too much about creating new knowledge. Observe how his feeble empiricism is affected by this grid: he believes a distant ship's narrow masts are easier to see in a blur than the bulky hull, and the eye sees the world with half of the iris at a time (when in fact he is describing very well how the world looks through bifocals).

The scientist, on the other hand, demonstrates an attitude that knowledge continues to be created as we observe and reason. I think he could have made some better arguments, but at least he showed --without attacking one's faith-- that although we still don't know it all, we have the divine gifts of intellect and reason to help us along. 

I love maps, (here's one of my faves) and I enjoy the paradox that maps, in order to represent certain features of the terrain, must distort or omit the representation of other features. Paradigms are like that: they only work when they block extraneous chunks from your view of the whole. Just as "the map is not the territory", so a single paradigm does not encompass the whole of our knowledge and experience. Your world is flat only if you ignore the spiky parts; my problem (actually, it's your problem) is that the spiky parts are what I notice most. Even contemporary, Western scientists have impeded the advance of science because certain things just "couldn't be true."

Some time ago I wrote about dolphins swimming through the center of Istanbul, and the total indifference of those around me to this marvel. I still wonder about that, and about us. What do we fail to see because we are unaware of our own biases and have already made up our minds?

There was irony in the mud

The truth is dirtier than I first led you to believe.

A couple days ago I shared a Turkish television commercial about the virtues of dirt. A comment from Nancy Riffer made me realize that, while trying not to offend my readers who have Turkish moms themselves, I omitted some important keys to really understanding the commercial.

That beautiful commercial is full of irony which is not lost on Turkish viewers. The kids in that ad do the things that normal kids only dream of.  A Turkish city child's life is full of structure, straight lines, and spotless clothes, which makes life easier for moms, but not for kids.

The truth is, kids are normally not allowed to play in the mud. Or in the water, or on the grass, and certainly not in the rain. Elementary schools have plain, paved play areas; the lucky ones have portable soccer goals and basketball hoops. No swings, seesaws, slides, or other dangerous devices. I believe this overprotection and hyper-cleanliness is related to what I've seen as an avoidance of experimental, improvisational and mistake-based learning. We're a long way from the mud-based learning of my childhood.

Omo has a few more gritty commercials that show a clean, well dressed little boy who encounters other kids in the park, but doesn't know how to play with them.  You can watch them here and here. The marbles ad ends with the statement:  "Only 28% of children spend time playing outside or on playgrounds." The hide and seek ad ends with "Only 17% of mothers give their children permission to play outside." Both ads end with, "Every child has the right to be a child."

These ads point to another website by Omo, with a URL that means "every child's right" in Turkish. That website has suggestions for giving children freedom to develop, games to play, and an advice column for worried moms. One of their main pieces of advice is, "give your kids some free time."

But let's not leave things there. There is one more commercial which is my personal favorite. You don't need to understand the words, but at the end the narrator says, "Sports takes bravery -- just like life." Here's the link if you can't see the embedded video.

One last thing: if you're reading this via email, you probably can't see the videos. You'll have to go to my blog (just click here).

Ve Türkçe bilenler --bu siteden hoşlanacağınıza eminim; Her çocuğun hakkı.

_______________________________

Click here for a follow-up post on the same topic. Bu konunun devamı için tıklayınız.

Messy is beautiful

April, glorious and muddy, was made for children. Or have we forgotten?

Prof. Ziya Selçuk, formerly of the Ministry of Education here, at the closing ceremony of a seminar on multiple intelligences spoke openly about myths that have guided the design of education and proposed a better way. He debunked ideas about quiet, orderly, unison lessons, where everyone sits straight and is taught the same thing at the same time. Orderly isn't always good.

Turks are immaculate, keep spotless homes, and practice fastidious personal hygiene. While I appreciate and admire that, I also remember fondly those Aprils on the Michigan farm where I grew up, digging mud puddle canals and building mud dams, wrestling on the new grass with the dogs, collecting worms and tadpoles. Having a grand old time while my brain quietly created an understanding of life.

Schools --and Turkish moms-- are in a constant battle against chaos, crooked lines, and grass stains. Learning, however, loves a mess. That's why some of my favorite television commercials here are by a laundry detergent company that celebrates mess, mud, and childhood with the motto, "getting dirty is beautiful."  Probably the first time those words have co-occurred in Turkish.

So here's one of those Omo commercials. Let's pray that YouTube stays online long enough for you to enjoy it! I've also done a rough translation of the voice over.

You can't just watch life from a window.
If you don't start out on the road, you'll never arrive.
You can't always sit on the sidelines.
If you don't get out on the field, you'll never hit a goal.
You'll never swim if you don't get wet.
You'll never rise high if you never climb.
If you never live, you'll never learn.
The stains and smudges of the children's world
are the badges of what they have learned and achieved.
Omo - getting dirty is beautiful.

Radikal'in haberi buraya, Omo'nun reklamların hakkında güzel bir yorum için buraya tıklayın.

Don't be afraid to leave something out

The first rule of listener-friendly PowerPoint use: please don't tell me everything you know.

There's been a lot already on the Web by professional communicators about the use and misuse of PowerPoint (links at the end). The main point is that cluttered slides with lots of images and lots of words inhibit learning.

Now we have a Harvard scientist telling us what we already knew: if you put less in your PowerPoint presentation, your audience will remember more. Stephen M. Kosslyn, psychology professor at Harvard University, explains how to apply cognitive science to your slides, emphasizing visual depictions of information and basic rules of simplicity (read more here).

Before coming to this school, I worked in a public sector agency where we regularly gave briefings to foreign visitors. The briefings were prepared by the public relations team and were designed out of a fear of omission (the darker side of the obsession to impress). Each year the briefing grew longer and more complicated as more projects and other accomplishments demanded inclusion in the presentation.

By the time I left that job, the briefing (we should have called it an elongating) took more than two hours and had hundreds of narcotic slides, many of them full of large numbers, others with nearly a hundred words in miniscule, illegible type. At the end we had aides ready with plenty of Turkish coffee to revive the victims, but it was too late. When the presenter would ask for questions, there was usually just dazed silence, followed by acute memory loss (what did slide #87 say again?).

The fear of omission is cultivated early. When students are required to give a presentation or write a research paper, they feel pressure to demonstrate how much they know about the topic. This feeds the mistaken logic that says that a fact not presented is a fact not known. The purpose of the presentation is focused on the presenter and a motivation to impress or to avoid embarrassment. On the other hand, a well designed presentation focuses on the listener and how she can be enlightened or persuaded. A presentation that is just for the presenter is a waste of everybody's time.

We let students show off their ability to embed animations and create whizbang slide transitions, when we should be teaching them how to communicate. We need to shift the emphasis from displaying information to enabling learning, with an emphasis that is less about what goes on the screen and more about what goes into --and stays in-- the listener's brain.

Here are some more resources for more effective presentations:

Seth Godin: Really bad PowerPoint

Tryangulation: Put your PowerPoint on a diet

a del.icio.us potpourri of links by me

photo by zen

Many years and a few terabytes later

This weekend marks 10 years since I first set foot in Turkey. Funny thing, as I started doing the math, I realized that I have several converging milestones that illustrate some lessons about knowledge and learning, with a little help from a computer.

If you want to skip the history and jump ahead to the moralizing, just scroll down.

1973. Thirty-five years ago I took a computing class in high school. It was basically a mash-up of binary code, the mechanics of card punching, and the virtue of cards as a sortable database record (although I don't recall learning the 'd' word then). Our final exam had problems like converting between binary and decimal numbers, and reading the alphanumeric codes in cards like the one in the photo. Of course we students never actually touched a computer. Let's hope that today all teachers can see what went wrong. I still got an A, but I had a lot more fun in my music independent study and hanging out with friends in my Rambler.

1982-83. Twenty-five years ago I used an Osborne portable computer-in-a-suitcase to work on indigenous language publications in Guatemala. It looked like something out of an old spy movie, with the world's smallest green screen, and couldn't handle more than one keystroke per second. I originally went to Guatemala to get away from a problem (even though the civil war in Guate was at its peak!), but while there I had to face up to some things inside me, and in a manner of speaking start over and move on.

1988. Nearly 20 years ago, in Guatemala again, I got my first Toshiba laptop. It had two 3.5 inch floppy drives: drive A to run your programs, and drive B to hold your data disk. That same spring I nearly died of typhoid fever and malaria (at the same time), which resulted in me learning a lot about the fecal-oral vector and the most effective ways to kill flies (my record was 72 in 10 minutes).

1998. After finishing my masters in development administration in '96, we were back in Houston using our Packard-Bell PC for international job searching. I was designing CVs with graphics on WordPerfect for Windows 95, and attaching them in email to people I was meeting on usenet and --get this-- the World Wide Web, which can never be fully appreciated by anyone who has not used Gopher, a system for online information retrieval that closely resembled climbing in and out of very deep abandoned wells. 

Thanks to the web I networked, followed up on leads, and finally made contact with a friend of a friend who offered to set up some appointments for me in Ankara. We met up ten years ago this week. My appointments led to other contacts, and after I returned to the US I was able to use email to keep in touch with those new contacts. A year later one of them wrote to offer me a job and the rest is, well, history.

That was the short version of my digital odyssey. Through the years I also learned a few languages, a few musical instruments, and I even learned how to teach. What's better, though, is that I learned how to learn: how to work up a guitar piece, how to form linguistic questions in a new language, how to do field research, how to read the look in my wife's eyes.

Here's my take away after 35 years at the keyboard of life:

Knowledge is a means towards doing what you really want. You don't learn databases just because they're there. You learn them because you're data's in a mess and you can't see the patterns. You learn MS Word because you need to update your resume. You learn Spanish because you want to sing like Enrique. You learn music remixing because you want to impress your girlfriend. The corollary to this is:

If you already have what you want, learning slows down. Learning is the most basic form of change management: no change, no learning; no learning, no change.

Latin America was my gig for nearly 20 years, and living there was practically second nature. Turkey is so different that after we came here we had to learn an incredible amount from scratch, including how to live together as a family in our new environment. But here we are, living here for eight years and doing a lot better than just getting by. That's because:

The more stuff you learn, the more you (should) learn about yourself. Which, by the way, is not a new idea. You really get to know yourself when you're uncomfortable (that is, experiencing change). You find out what motivates you and what doesn't. You reconsider the goals you set for yourself back when you were on easy street. You figure out that what matters most is not what you know, but who you are. So...

Don't act your age. I was 45 when I learned Turkish. I was nearly 50 when I learned how to blog, wiki, and Skype. Now I am enjoying these new skills and sharing them with others. Good thing, because our kids in the US are tethered to Facebook and use email, like, never (it's sooo 1999). I have to confess that I've had a lot of personal trials in the last year, and I felt the wear and tear of the last 30 years catching up with me. So now I'm learning that you need others near you to help you wake up again and undo some of that maturity (this is why God created kids). Get renewed, like it says in these lines from Stephen Dunn.  And speaking of the butterfly effect...

It's all connected. My first trip to Guatemala in 1976 was led by my human geography professor. He's one of the world's best teachers, and we still keep in touch. In fact, I wonder if the personal bond is both cause and result of our collaborative exploring. I loved his class and the study trip, but by far the biggest lesson was that geology, topography, climate, social organization, technology, were all connected. Everywhere. Sociology, biology, psychology. Body, mind and soul. It's all there, and they're all in us.

When studying linguistics I learned about splitters and joiners. Some people are better at seeing contrasts (splitters) and some are better at seeing similarities (joiners). I am definitely a joiner, building bridges of comparison, analogy and metaphor, from what I know into what I am learning. I think that has made life a lot more fun. Which is a good thing, because...

It never ends.

Different is normal

Asombrose un portugués
al ver que en su tierna infancia
todos los niños de Francia
supieran hablar francés.

"Arte diabólico es,"
dijo torciendo el mostacho,
"que para hablar en gabacho
un infante en Portugal
llega a viejo y lo habla mal
¡y aquí lo parla un muchacho!"

                       (translation at the end of this post)

The last two posts were a little bit of fun with the Turkish language, but with some serious thoughts behind it. First, a story.

I remember many years ago while living in Guatemala, hearing a surprising comment from a local friend who had traveled once to the United States and was amazed to see there a parrot that spoke English! For him, it was normal for parrots to speak Spanish, and it had never occurred to him before that people in other lands teach their parrots differently. Anyone who has studied a foreign language as an adult has probably had a similar reaction when seeing for the first time small children speaking with no effort that same language that adults struggle with for years, and can never get quite right.

Just yesterday I was on a bus, listening to a mother and five year old son behind me. The little boy made almost no grammatical mistakes even though he was using some pretty complex constructions. Not only does Turkish pile lots of suffixes onto words, but the vowels in each suffix change according to the vowels in the root of the word! That's totally bizarre to us foreigners, but this little boy had it down pat. He even showed some objective awareness of his own language, since he was talking about Spiderman, and conjectured that "spider" meant örümcek and "man" meant adam (he was rıght).

Likewise, in my travels and experience with an unusual assortment of languages, I have noticed different ways in which native speakers relate to non-native speakers.  It seems that the more people see foreigners with differing ability speak their language, the more the native speakers learn to adapt their behavior to facilitate communication. Conversely, the fewer foreigners there are who learn a language, the more difficult it is for a native speaker to understand the foreigner's problem. After all, their language is the normal one; it's only foreign languages that are different.

In touristy areas in Latin America, people readily speak more slowly and adjust their grammar for me, since they can tell I'm a gringo from a mile away. In Turkey, though, many people don't slow down or simplify their statements even when I ask them to (the ones who do slow down tend to be bilingual).  In fact, one time a Turkish gentleman refused to answer a question I asked in Turkish, because he automatically assumed I was speaking English. In a village in western Guatemala where I worked for a while among speakers of a Mayan language, I was the only non-native speaker most folks had seen, and since this was the first time they had seen anyone shred all vestiges of sense out of their language, I became a sought after source of entertainment for the villagers on market days -- all I had to do was talk!

I wonder sometimes in discussions about what education should look like in the 21st century, with schools and classrooms and everything 2.0, if we digital natives and digital permanent residents aren't a little too hard sometimes on those who haven't had as much contact with us foreigners (can I call them digital tourists?). Maybe we need to step out of our assumed roles and stop thinking for a moment that we're the normal ones.  How can we bridge those paradigm gaps and learn to live with other kinds of normal? Perhaps by  speaking more clearly to the "recent learners' among us when we're the majority, and learning and serving with humility when we're the minority?

At the rate technology is changing, I wonder how many of the tools and approaches we advocate now will be obsolete in 10 years, and yet some of us who are at present in the vanguard will insist that we keep using them because they are the norm: Twitter? But teacher, that is soo 2008!

As promised,  a (not so poetic) translation

A Portuguese man was surprised
To see that in their tender years
All the children in France
Already knew how to speak French.

"This must be sorcery" he said,
Twisting his moustache.
"For a child in Portugal
To learn to speak French,
He'll grow to be an old man
And will still speak it badly,
Yet here even a small boy speaks it!"

 

SMS is something of an oxymoron

When we moved to Turkey eight years ago I had the advantage of prior study in several languages, and  actually achieved competence in a few, so I'm particularly interested in how people learn languages. However, I've been immersed in Turkish long enough to occasionally forget how amazing it is that for native speakers this language actually sounds normal. Then I get a jolt like this flier my wife brought home a few days ago.

Turkish grammar is fascinating for its adherence nearly without exception to its many rules, but since word formation and grammar are almost complete the opposite of English (although occasionally it's more like inside out), you have to learn a lot before you can use even a little. In the case of this document, for example, an adjective accumulates enough suffixes to change it into a verb, then a participle, and then into a full fledged dependent clause.

The flier is an advert for a home decor store, and the first sentence reads, Are you one of those whose home we have perfected, (or) are you one of those whose home we have not perfected?

Knowing that much, can you figure out how the second clause was made negative?